I’m not that interested in the HD format war because I do not have a television that is HD Ready and do not plan to buy one in the near future. Maybe that is one of the reasons why I feel a little bit lost about the success or failure of HD-DVD and Blue-Ray players and movies.

I thought that I’m going to discuss it with each of you. What are your thoughts about both formats ? Do you think that Blue-Ray is in the lead, maybe because of the boost after the release of the Playstation 3 by Sony ? Or is it the HD-DVD format that you think will win this war.

If you thought that you would be starring at those boring LCD or Plasma displays for the next ten years you will now be proven wrong. Some displays look incredible cool. I personally would love to lay my hands on the Samsung 12mm thick LCD display, the Toshiba Interactive 3D Display and the Touchless Touchscreen. I decided to only include my favorites from the ten future display technologies and suggest that you head out to the original website who posted the list to see the others.

Many people sell their old digital camera when they buy a new one. Those cameras are often sold on sites like eBay and it is a wise move to make sure that all photos in the internal memory and on external smartcards are not readable anymore. This might not be a big problem if you simply took some pictures of landscapes all the time but it soon becomes one if you took personal and private pictures with that camera.

First Dell PCs with AMD chips and now Dell PCs with Linux preinstalled. It seems that Dell finally managed to see that giving its customers a choice is the way to go in this matter. Linux has some advantages over PCs that ship with Windows Vista or Microsoft Windows XP. The first and most prominent one is of course the price tag. Dell can reduce the costs that customers have to pay for a PC even further and advertise this properly.

I found a nice USB software called My Pen Drive which can be freely downloaded from the developers homepage. It is basically offering two great features: One is the ability to autostart applications from the USB drive when it gets connected to the computer, the other a automatic backup function which backups (pre-)selected folders that are saved on the USB drive when it connects to the computer.

I knew that something like that was going to happen eventually and it did happen with the releases of “Stranger Than Fiction” and “The Holiday”. Mick B posted the story on a new blog that he apparently created just for the purpose of bringing the news to the world. He rented the two DVD movies (from Sony Pictures) and tried to play them on his Sony DVP-CX995V DVD player. Both DVD movies did load until the splash screen was shown and stopped loading from that moment on. After 60 seconds the DVD player did turn itself off with no apparent reaso

Yesterday a story about building a gaming pc for $800 hit the digg frontpage and soon became popular throughout the world wide web. The system looks quite impressive if you consider the budget and makes a good impression at first glance. There are however some questions that arise which I would like to address. But lets do a quick view of the system in question first. They have chosen a Core 2 Duo E6300 cpu from Intel, 1 gigabyte of PC-6400 Ram, a Geforce 7600 GT, a 160 gigabyte hard drive from Seagate, Antec case with 400W power supply, mouse, keyboard, soundcard and Windows XP Home.

The bios can be protected with a password to prevent others from accessing its settings. You have to enter the password to be able to access it, if you can’t provide the correct one the access gets denied. The following method describes a way to recover the password if you forgot it or bought a used computer with a bios password.

I don’t know why Sony is so obsessed with Linux, it just does not feel right but I really can’t find a good motive for the support – yet. Some guy apparently installed Linux Fedora Core on his Playstation 3 and dumped everything that he could get his hands on. He was able to dump a complete game disc to his external usb hard drive that he connected to the PS3.

Every song that you send to someone else from your Zune is restricted to a limit number of plays before it becomes useless on the recipients Zune. This is really bad if you want to swap music files that you created on your own for example. There is however a (rather complicated) way to transfer files from one Zune to the other without those DRM restrictions. First you need to enable hard drive mode in your operating system.

This trick might actually work with more cards than just my Nvidia Geforce 6600 GT card manufactured by MSI. The default fan noise is so irritating that I was looking for ways to either turn it down by software, bios upgrades or replacing the fan. I preferred the software method over flashing the bios over buying a new fan that could replace the old one. After consulting google with searchtearms like geforce 6600 fan speed, reduce fan speed geforce and similar strings I finally found a forum entry that was about the problem I faced.

Some scene guys apparently released a driver for Windows XP that makes it capable to connect and detect the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive that was released a few days ago in the United States. I do not own a Xbox 360 nor the HD-DVD add-on (of course) but this could be great news for some of you guys out there that do own both. All you need is to get hold of the driver which was released under the name XBOX360.HD-DVDRom.UDF.Reader.v2.5.WindowsXP-BluePrint.

Many users just buy blank CDs and DVDs without thinking much about the manufacturer who created them – most want it cheap which has the result that their system has to cope with different media. They notice that their system burns some CDs and DVDs faster without knowing why. Your burner might have the specification to burn DVDs with 8x speed but your burning software offers you only 4x. This article explains why that is the case and what you can do to never make this happen again.

Combimouse, a crossbread of keyboard and mouse looks pretty strange to say the least. On the one hand we have a patented and award winning design and on the other hand we have the users who will surely think twice before they give this a try. Let us see how this works. You can type normally and once you need to use the mouse you use your right hand to touch a certain spot on the right unit to activate mouse mode. This means there is no way to hit the keys accidentally while using mouse mode or move the cursor while typing.

What is wrong with those movie and music companies ? Why the heck are they increasing the pressure on people who are actually buying their overpriced items instead of those who copy them in large scale ? Their newest invention is apparently an embedded radio transmitter chip that can be remotely tracked by those companies making it possible to follow a DVD, Blue-Ray or HD-DVD from factory to consumer.

Do you like watching movies on your computer monitor or do you prefer to watch them on your television ? I think most people who answer this question prefer to watch the movies on tv which has many advantages: Bigger Screen, you can watch with more people without feeling crowded around a pc monitor and it has that certain tv feeling that watching on a pc monitor has not.

This sounds a little strange at first, don’t you think ? I really had to investigate the matter further, let us check out what this is all about. The Australian PC World revealed the new Blue-Ray drive about three weeks ago on their website.

Automatic Acoustic Management is a feature of most modern hard drives which reduces the seek noice at the cost of perfomance. Most hard drives have this feature disabled but it is possible to enable it using a tool like silent drive which runs on Windows Xp and 2000 only. Please note that silent drive is only working with IDE drives at the moment and that the gui is in german.

A Beginner’s Guide to What Goes on Inside that PC published by extremetech a few days ago tries to explain the components of a personal computer without the “geek” language. It aims at a audience that did not have the time or desire to understand how a pc is working. The eight-parts article begins with an introduction and goes on by encouraging everyone to take a look at their own pc. (After saving all work and the like). It would be a good way to print the article to be able to read it and look at the turned off computer at the same time.

Are you planning to purchase a new computer in the near future ? You are also someone who builds the computer on his own, someone who does not rely on retail computers that might have parts that are not the quality you demand ? The gotfrag price guide might be a good starting point if you answered both questions with yes.

Is it a good idea to look at online marketplaces like ebay to find a (used) notebook ? Is it a good idea to buy a used one or should one go for a new one ? Buying used ones has some advantages over new models: The price will be considerably lower, even if the used one has been purchased just a few months ago. Prices for last generations notebooks drop fast, even more if they have been used already.

A study conducted by Professor Martin Gill of the University of Leicester came to the conclusion that second hand computers pose a great risk of fraud and identity theft. They purchased six computers in the course of their study from various second hand channels. Six computers may not seem to justify the results but it can be seen as an indicator. Half of them had not been securely wiped while one had not been wiped at all. Two of the three contained enough information for identity theft.

This is just to strange, someone build a clock that looks like the game Pong. The left site counts the hours while the right site counts the minutes. This means every minute the right site wins a point and every hours the left one does. Strange concept but great looking unique clock.

Are you tired of your keyboard that looks like every other keyboard out, do you want to try something new ? Have you ever thought that a different design would be better suited for you and would make you the ultimate typing machine ?

Beginning next year Koreans will have the option to buy their own personal robot for a price of 1000$ – 2000$. The robots have lots of functions, some include cleaning rooms, home monitoring and reading books.

Now this one is a neat little gadget. This credit card sized USB drive has a capacity of up to 8 GB, uses USB 2.0 and runs driver free on Windows XP+2000 and Mac OS X. The card measures 6mm in height and weights only 60g.